“Of course,” I muttered to myself. “Why waste cruise ship full of people?”

I was looking through the pictures Alice had taken on her phone of the captives. The pictures were in various states of shitty as she couldn’t walk up to the pirates and ask for a selfie, but there were a lot and together they painted a pretty bleak picture. I hadn’t noticed during my brief walk through with Alice earlier, but many, if not all of the passengers had small brands cut into their skin. Sometimes on their forehead, some on their bicep, some over their heart. From what I could make out, it seemed like a sacrificial marker but without being able to study it up close with my magical senses I couldn’t tell anything else about them.

“Jesus,” I said, attracting her attention away from her conversation with Ida. “How’d you get these?”

I was wearing clothes again, a black tank that was too small and showed my midriff if I raised my arms a tiny bit and a part of cargo shorts that miraculously fit. I didn’t bother with shoes because the LotOS were better than anything we could scrounge. I was feeling much better, too—aside from the growing horror of being responsible for several hundred passengers and crew being sacrificed to a demon. The healing spell had done wonders, a small nap and six cans of Campbell’s soup (CHUNKY SOUP THAT EATS LIKE A MEAL! 17G PROTEIN PER CAN! BEEF WITH COUNTRY VEGETABLES! HINTS OF PENCIL ERASER! WE ARE LEGALLY ALLOWED TO ADVERTISE/REFER TO THE PROTEIN AS MEAT!) was enough to make me feel somewhat like I did before I boarded this doomed cruise liner.

Alice at some point had changed out of the clothes I had rudely bled all over and was wearing a black tank similar to mine and yoga pants, her hair in a high tail. If it wasn’t for the magical arsenal she had strapped all over her, you could mistake her a young woman on the way to the gym. She had a pair of metal-back gloves on each hand, with the metal polished so much it was reflective. If I stared at them too long I got a headache. Attached to each bicep was a brass bangle designed to look like a hand. Around her neck was a black choker with a jewel the shape of an eye at its center, that would occasionally move and look at something around the room. Around her waist was a thin chain looped many times and didn’t seem to be fastened to her or her belt loops in any way, but seemed to be oddly heavy.

Ida, on the other hand, remained much the same in her tac vest and fatigue pants. She had swapped out her submachine gun for an assault rifle somehow, however. An AK-47. “When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.” To quote the great Sam Jackson.

“You know Jackie Brown, but not Dexter?” Alice had asked when I had said the quote.

“I’m not a TV guy! I like movies! Two to three hours and you’re done,” I said around a mouthful of soup.

“I have not seen Jackie Brown,” Ida said from the door.

“It’s good,” I said, with Alice nodding. “It’s one of Quintin Tarintino’s movies.”

Ida made a face. “Is he the one that did Hateful Eight? I did not like that one.”

Anyway, back in the present.

Alice took her phone from me and tucked it into her pants… somehow. Her rather lovely rear now had a big rectangle in it. Do yoga pants have pockets? My musing drifted off as I noticed her expression became a little… embarrassed? Did she catch me staring at her butt?

“...Yes?” I asked.

She winced. “I’m… well, I’m a… low, level telepath?” She kind of drew out the last word. “Probably a better phrase would be a strong empath. But I can exert some small control on those around me, enough to nudge their attention away.”

She fidgeted, looking everywhere but me, clutching her elbows in what was clearly defensive body language. I sighed and ran my hand through my hair, defeating another couple tangles.

“Or make someone warm up to you,” I elaborated for her.

She glanced at my face and nodded. It made sense. I did warm up to her almost immediately, on my first day of vacation after spending eightish (I’m guess I’m counting from when I went into hiding now and not just when I started peddling murderers) years avoiding everyone, except for the occasional phone call to my mom. I glanced over at Ida, and she gave me a “What the fuck are you looking at me for? You two are the magical idiots,” look.

I turned back to Alice and opened my mouth to speak, thought better of it, started over. “Whatever,” I said, gesturing vaguely. “We can talk about it after we fight the pirates.”

“Kill.”

I looked at Ida, who was glaring at me. “We are going to kill the pirates,” she said, iron in her words.

I opened my mouth to reply but she rode me over. “I saw you fight the other warlocks,” she said, her voice hard and angry. “You did not use your magic. You only resorted to guns when you were backed into a corner. We cannot win with these half measures. The next time we fight, we need to strike hard and fast. I do not care about whatever moral—“ she struggled to find the word in English for a moment. “—bullshit hangups you have, but we are going to kill these pirates, save the hundreds of lives on this ship, and I AM GOING TO GO HOME TO SEE MY MOTHER AND SISTER! AND SHOWER REGULARLY!”

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Then she started shouting in French and I had to rush over and put my hand over her mouth like she had done to me when we first met. She didn’t struggle much, knowing she shouldn’t be yelling, but I noticed that when she calmed down it was because she had a knife pressed against my groin. I slowly let go of her mouth.

“We good? We can use our inside voices now?” I asked.

She glared at me but nodded.

I backed away slowly until she sheathed her knife, and I resumed my spot on the sole bench in the room. The room looked like an old style utility closet, but bigger, like a crew worked out of it. I hadn’t taken the time to look before and—now was not the time, Colm.

“She’s not wrong,” Alice said.

“I know she’s not fucking wrong,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

“Also, can you do that thing again? Make your eyes normal? You’re kinda freaky to look at,” Alice requested.

“Oui,” Ida agreed. “It is hard to know what you are thinking.”

Oh, had I left them out? I focused inward briefly and the tentacles vanished. I reached up and felt my face with the backs of my knuckles, keeping my claws away from my very valuable sensory organs.

“Thank you,” Alice said.

There was a looooooong, drawn out, awkward as fuck silence.

“Before the other day I’d never killed anyone,” I said at last. “It wasn’t even on purpose. I…” I hung my head.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, before either of the ladies could chime in. “You’re right. It’s not just me and my problems here. I… Yeah. I— Yeah.”

The ladies were mercifully quiet through my internal struggle. Finally I slapped my cheeks—fucking, ow—hid the unexpected pain of being slapped by the LotOS and stood.

“Guess I should break out the big guns then,” I said and summoned my spellbook.

For me it was routine, I’d done it so many times. But I forgot that, save for one instance, Ida hadn’t seen me cast much magic yet. Her expression started as mildly irritated, then confused, then awed as I stuck my hand into a sliver in reality and retrieved a ten pound book.

Alice was also impressed. “You have a spacial cubby?!” She said, getting close to the rift. “How the fuck do you know how to do that? Who taught you?!”

She reached out to touch it and I slapped her hand away, which earned me a scowl. “It’s point-zero-zero-six degrees Kelvin in there,” I explained, which mollified her expression. “And to answer your question I learned from a diary I found in an estate sale. Or was it an antique store?” I shrugged.

“You learned this,” Alice said with a wild gesture at the rift in space. “From a second hand book you stumbled on?”

I shrugged. “I learned all my magic that way,” I said. “The stuff I didn’t figure out on my own, anyway.”

“How are you not dead?!”

I shrugged again. “It’s not impossible,” I said. “The first guys (or ladies) to figure out magic did it.”

I hefted my book open and started turning to where I had recorded the offensive spells. “But if you have a formal education I’d love to pick your brain because a lot of these assholes I’ve studied from mention things like Locks and Keys repeatedly but don’t mention what they are or do and I haven’t been able to figure it out from context.”

Alice put her face in her hands. “You don’t have your bulwark,” she muttered into her hands.

I looked up from my book. “My what?”

“It goes by a lot of names,” Alice said, lowering her hands and giving me a look I associate with people on a gun range telling you not to look down the barrel of your gun. “The lock and key method was favored by American practitioners in the nineteenth century, but has since been replaced with easier techniques. I use a bulwark.”

“...Which is…?” I prompted.

“It’s a mental construct you build in your mind to keep your spells from bleeding over and cooking your brain,” she said, but I could hear the silent “you fucking moron.”

“Oh! OH MY GOD!” I said. “I need that! Can you teach me?”

She winced. “We don’t have the time,” she said, her expression finally softening. “It takes years of practice.”

I swore sulfurously. Ida arched an eyebrow, impressed.

I calmed down and started turning the pages of my spellbook, perhaps with a bit more force than was safe. I’m pretty sure the book would never harm me, but I’d never treated it roughly before, either. I felt Alice approach and place a hand on my arm, stopping me.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be looking at spells?” She half-asked. “We—“

“It’s too late for that now,” I said, interrupting. “I know enough to know when to stop casting before I cook my brain, and we’re in too deep to not bring everything to bear.”

Alice dropped her hand and let out a sigh. Her expression froze when she caught what I was reading.

“’Render the fat from my enemies?’ Really?” She asked.

I shrugged. “I’ve always been curious about it. Go big or go home.”

Ida snorted in amusement.

“Have you used it before?” Alice asked.

“Once,” I admitted. “On some roadkill. It does what it says on the tin.” I waved her away. “Now quit interrupting. If we’re going to do anything soon I need to memorize these quickly.”

“We should figure that out now, though,” Alice said, looking to Ida. “Do you have any insight?”

Ida frowned and though for a moment, her hand playing over the dust jacket of her new rifle. “I have not seen the warlocks making their diagrams or pentagrams or whatever you magic people call them,” she said. “Aside from the one Colm destroyed yesterday. They must be waiting for us to reach their island.”

I winced. “Which should be any minute now, if your previous estimate was accurate.”

“Island?” Alice asked, eyes wide.

“Their home base is an island somewhere in the south Pacific,” Ida clarified. “It’s…”

“I get the impression it’s a big shithole of casual murder and abused women,” I supplied when Ida trailed off. Alice looked to me, back to Ida, who nodded grimly. Which reminded me of something.

“Ida, do they make you wear those amulets on the island?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “In fact, it’s a hazing ritual to trick the new recruits into taking theirs off and laughing as they scream to death.”

Alice looked pale. I caught her attention. “We’re going to have to figure out something," I suggested.

"Yeah," she said. "No shit."